Replication and extension of Newman, Bloom, and Knobe (2014) studies 1 and 2

Abstract

People tend to view their own “true self” as generally positive, and as guiding inner moral values. Newman et al. (2014) demonstrated that the true-self link to morality extends also to attributions towards others’ behaviors and changes. We conducted a pre-registered replication and extensions project of Newman et al. (2014)’s Studies 1 and 2, with a US American online Amazon Mechanical Turk sample (N = 803). We found support for Study 1’s findings that morally positive changes in others are perceived as more reflective of true-self than morally negative changes [i) forced-choice measure: original: η² p=.39, 95%CI[.25, .51]; replication: η² p= .20; 95% CI [.16, .23]; ii) true self rating: original: η² p=.33, 95%CI[.19, .45]; replication:η² p=.22, 95%CI[.15, .25]. We found support for Study 2’s findings that changes more aligned with observers’ political moral views are perceived as more reflective of true-self [original:η² p=.04, 95%CI[.00, .11] ; replication: .35, 95%CI[.29, .41]. Extending the replication, we examined associations between true-self attributions and perceived social norms and found that social norms was positively correlated with true self attribution [Study1: most of the rs ranged from .07 to .21; Study 2: all rs ranged from .10 to .30]. Supplementary, materials, raw data and analysis files/code are available here: https://osf.io/9fvtq/ .